CircleCI founder Paul Biggar is the author of the Darklang programming language. He recently announced in a blog that the Darklang team will devote all its efforts to AI/GPT. Darklang will be restructured into a complete set of AI-driven infrastructure, and most of the code will be generated by AI. .

Darklang is a programming language (with built-in infrastructure) for “deployless” deployment. Strictly speaking, it’s a mix of language, editor, and infrastructure, primarily for building backend web services.

The original intention of Darklang is to break the explosion of tool sets and make it easier to deploy code to the production environment: programmers only need to write code, and the code will be put into production directly. To put it simply, Darklang can write code directly in the ide, and Darklang’s infrastructure will help you compile and deploy, version management, AB testing, and configure cloud environments, such as load balancing, disaster recovery, expansion and contraction, and service Discovery, etc., let you go from writing code to production in less than 1 minute.

As of February 1st, the Darklang team has discontinued work on what is currently known as “darklang-classic” and is fully committed to creating the new “darklang-gpt”, which has the same core as Darklang but has been redesigned to incorporate AI Generation as the main way to write code (and maybe just AI to write code).

Of course, the main advantages of Darklang will not change after refactoring, such as Deployless, Invisible Infrastructure and Trace-Driven Development, which are its core competitiveness that distinguishes other programming languages, because these features require the integration of editors, languages ​​and infrastructure Cooperate. (But in my opinion, this is also one of its disadvantages. Users can only be bound to its development platform when using the Dark language.)

The main change is the process of writing code, the Darklang team is trying to use AI to write almost all Darklang products in Darklang,The goal is that more than 90% of the code, including AI experiments, OpenAI integration, ApiServer, user management, notifications, package manager, DarkLangChain, etc., are generated and built by AI directly in Darklang.

On the other hand, since the code is generated by AI, the text editor is of course meaningless. In Paul Biggar’s vision, there may be “2-3 times better code generation UX than text editors”, such as cursor,An editor designed for AI programming.

But as Paul Biggar said in his blog post, they don’t really know what product to make.The current plan is to conduct a series of experiments, let users try it out, and then use user feedback to figure out this newWhat exactly does the product need.

latest progress

DarklangGPT has successfully pushed the Darklang language forward, such asHuge progress was made in the type system, technical debt was eliminated, language features were added, inconsistencies and runtime errors were fixed, error messages were improved, new unnecessary language features were also removed like typing bugs… In the words of Paul Biggar, “Achieved more in February and March than in the past two years combined“.

At present, the Darklang homepage has also been updated with DarklangGPT information. Similar to Bing AI, DarklangGPT has also opened a “waiting list”, and users who join the waiting list can experience the new DarklangGPT for the first time.

But in the editor’s opinion, it is not so much “Darklang is fully committed to AI”, it is better to say that this is Darklang’s dying gamble. There was some chatter about Darklang when it was first launched a few years ago, but now it’s almost invisible. In terms of economy, Darklang’s last financing was $3.5 million in 2019, and the title of the previous blog post announcing the transformation of AI was “Sponsoring Darklang”.

Paul Biggar also bluntly said:

Like an aging rock star making a final stab at glory, I’m delighted to announce that Darklang is going all in on AI/GPT.

Like an aging rock star making one last stand for gloryI am happy to announce that Darklang will be fully committed to AI/GPT.

The comments on this blog post are also quite interesting:

“Is this an announcement, or a request for help?”

— A little bit of both.